IDT Meetings: How to Make Sure They Are Patient-Centered
An Interdisciplinary Team, or IDT, is a group of professionals from various disciplines who work together to attend to the holistic needs of hospice patients and their families including physical, psychosocial, emotional, and spiritual needs. The IDT is tasked with developing and updating the Plan of Care (POC) as well as coordinating care services for the patient. Given these, it plays a critical role in hospice care.
To ensure its role is effectively performed, industry practices dictate the IDT meet no less than every 15 days. However, since the team is composed of different individuals with differing priorities and opinions, meetings often run overtime and end without concrete output, leading to wasted time and resources.
To prevent these from happening to your IDT meetings, we put together some tips to maintain your meetings’ focus on the heart of hospice: a patient-centered care.
- Define each member’s responsibilities.
Each IDT member should have a complete understanding of their role and responsibility. They should not only come to the meetings prepared but they should also ensure they contribute to the discussions. The IDT should have the right mix of skills and experience with each member acting as a subject matter expert for his or her discipline. A team leader, who will be responsible for setting the expectations and tone of the meeting, should also be identified.
2. Establish and communicate the agenda.
An agenda is the foundation to any meeting. When the agenda is established and communicated to members prior to the meeting schedule, they can come prepared and the meeting can run with everyone aligned on its purpose. It can also serve as a guide on what should be discussed and what issues should be addressed. For instance, the agenda may reflect that the meeting will start with greetings, and then will move on to discuss death and bereavement, patient reviews, POC completions, and finally, announcements and agency updates before adjourning.
3. Prepare, organize, and update patient records.
Oftentimes, IDT meetings take too long because assigned disciplines spend time sifting through documents for patient charts, forms, and notes. Sometimes, even when the data is available, the team discovers that it is not updated and each member is looking at a different set of data. Thus, it is important that your EMR provides and generates complete, updated, and real-time data in order for the IDT to facilitate a productive discussion and make informed decisions, even when the supposedly assigned disciplines are not present.
4. Keep the focus on the patient.
Same with any other meeting, attendees may lose track of what needs to be discussed. Members start to gossip, whine, or get distracted and sidetracked by subjects not related to the meeting. When this happens, it is important that the IDT, with the facilitation of the team leader, return the focus to the patient through discussing and reviewing the Plan of Care. Members should keep the discussion on track starting with the problems identified for the patient, the goals established, and the interventions done. During the discussion, the IDT should assess if the interventions are working and if they are not, determine whether there is a need to add or change them. With the use of the comprehensive assessment and the POC, the IDT should aim to evaluate the patient’s eligibility for service, manage his or her symptoms, prepare the patient and the family for the death, and provide support to the family through the bereavement process.
These biweekly IDT meetings should not be a waste of your agency’s time and resources. They should not be treated as a burden or additional work for your staff. Instead, they should support and improve your daily provision of care, ensuring that you deliver high-quality patient-centered care.
Data Soft Logic, as your Intelligent Care Partner, aims to help you streamline your IDT meetings. With Hospice Centre’s care-plan centric IDT module, you can facilitate a healthy and productive discussion and collaboration during these meetings. Through its auto-plotting capabilities, you can be sure that only real-time updated data are reflected in your assessment, initial plan of care, notes, and forms. To discover the full benefit of this feature better and how your agency can take full advantage of it, schedule a demo with us now.
